Goal Met – Watch top 50 Movies of All Time

I really enjoyed this one as I love movies and this was an easy one to achieve. I again used ChatGPT to search all the top 50 movie lists out there then curate a list of consensus top 100 sorted by year released. I went through and removed movies that I have watched already (Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, etc.) and back filled those with the movies that didn’t make the original cut. Then I broke them down by decade until I had 5 for each decade.

Watching them in sequential order was a fascinating look into the technical and artistic progression of cinema. Starting with black and white silent films with actors who used their bodies to tell the story to the moment when Chaplin started singing and you realized that ‘talkies’ were now a thing,

The transition from black and white to color was also pretty fascinating from a technical perspective as you could see the film grain now and after some time I found I could almost identify which decade the movie was from purely based on the look of the film. The quality of the image got better and better with each watching ending up with a few HDR 4K visual spectacles.

I never once thought ‘why is this on the list?’ each movie was amazing and I found myself immersed in the storytelling and artistic achievement. Watching buster Keaton’s pratfalls and stunts was a visual delight and some of the over the top dialogue from the 40’s and 50’s wasn’t tacky it was straight entertaining. Some of the more poignant movies were heart wrenching such as the pianist which was a brutal watch but I couldn’t look away from the suffering. Stories like that need to be told so people don’t forget.

Film is an art – a way of telling a story in the tradition of storytellers of old. You have your improbable heroes like Lawrence of Arabia, you have your moral lessons like the great dictator or treasure of the Sierra Madre. These stories are important and I’m glad they are all being digitized to protect them as their loss would be a loss to society at large.

The one thing I didn’t get to do during this challenge was keep up on new movie releases – I was just too busy with all the various tasks I was juggling.  I did however, jot down the ones I wanted to watch in a notebook (along with TV series I want to watch) so when the challenge is over I’m going to relax and try to clear out my list!